Safe biking

Author:

Brent

A minimum threshold for effective cycling networks

RESEARCH
One meter of bike lane per person: A minimum threshold for effective cycling networks

Sometimes a simple indicator makes a big point. While some studies look at how the quality and location of bike lanes impact how many people bike to work, a recent effort considers only the sheer size of the network per person. The result is striking:

At about one meter of bike lane per person, a quarter of people bike to work (on the graph that’s 100 km per 100,000 people). After that threshold, this indicator by itself is insufficient to explain the variation between cities, as we should expect, since many other factors influence biking, including design and the distribution of homes and destinations. The chart does, however, suggest that a meter of bike lane per person is a useful minimum target for governments to aim for. Properly used, this target would then be supplemented by a careful analysis of bike-lane quality and location.

Providing a great deal of bike lane per person may not, by itself, be enough to convince more than a quarter of people to bike, but lacking bike lanes is sufficient to prevent people from biking. Cities with below 0.5 meters of bike lane per person have a consistently and substantially lower proportion of people who choose to bike to work.

The rest of the study models whether adding bike lanes creates greater health benefits than costs, comparing increases in physical activity with greater exposure to pollution and potential traffic accidents. They find the benefits outweigh the costs, but the trouble with such models is that the results depend on a long series of assumptions. They assume, for example, that everyone who takes transit walks a great deal, which is contracted by another recent study. Extrapolating from evidence that does not include variations in bike-lane quality will also underestimate the benefits for any city committed to quality, rendering the conclusions somewhat counterproductive. The objective evidence from today’s cities may be more convincing than a predictive model to policy makers, communicating the magnitude of potential benefits without stacking uncertain assumptions.

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The Jean Monnet Network in Health Law and Policy brings together health law specialists, social scientists, health services researchers, and policy-makers in order to build capacity in the study of comparative health policy. Its mandate is to provide opportunities for experts across fields and jurisdictions to share best practices, to identify common policy challenges, and to strengthen institutional ties across regions. Through its activities, the Network provides a clear focal point for the comparative study of health policy across the European Union and North America, for the diffusion of high-quality information on health policy, and for the training of new scholars and policy analysts in health policy. The Jean Monnet Network in Health Law and Policy in funded by the European Union through its Erasmus+ Jean Monnet program.